What's Behind Bannon?

Joshua Green is one of those rare journalists with a gift for excavating the ur-fckery through which dangerous political figures begin their journeys to become completely lethal. He did it with Karl Rove, and a classic piece examining what Rove had done in Alabama. Two years ago, writing for Bloomberg Businessweekin a similar feat of archaeology, Green spotted in the career of Steve Bannon, then merely a Trump supporter and the last heir to House Harkonnen, a genuine and rising threat to the democratic order.

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Even without knowing the identity of his backers, Bannon's designs are clear enough. While he'd blanch at the comparison, he's pursuing something like the old Marxist dialectical concept of "heightening the contradictions," only rather than foment revolution among the proletariat, he's trying to disillusion Clinton's and Bush's natural base of support, recognizing, as Goldman Sachs taught him, that you're more effective if others lead the way.

Now, Green has expanded his dig into a book, Devil's Bargain, which he's now touring and likely soon will be seen on a cable-TV news show near you.Vanity Fair is running an excerpt and, boy howdy, we have wandered into a deep, dark wood with a very untrustworthy guide. According to Green, Bannon not only was formed by the most severe of the Catholic ultramontane reactions to the Second Vatican Council, but he's also taken as an avatar a French religious seeker named Rene Guenon. For years, conservatives reveled in chapping liberals for their sweet-tooth for French intellectuals but, as Green demonstrates, Bannon, while playing in deep right field, has plucked himself a real lulu.

Bannon's reading eventually led him to the work of René Guénon, an early-20th- ­century French occultist and metaphysician who was raised a Roman Catholic, practiced Freemasonry, and later became a Sufi Muslim who observed the Sharia. There are many forms of traditionalism in religion and philosophy. Guénon developed a philosophy often called "Traditionalism" (capital "T"), a form of anti-modernism with precise connotations. Guénon was a "primordial" Traditionalist, who believed that certain ancient religions, including the Hindu Vedanta, Sufism, and medieval Catholicism, were repositories of common spiritual truths, revealed to mankind in the earliest age of the world, that were being wiped out by the rise of secular modernity in the West. What Guénon hoped for, he wrote in 1924, was to "restore to the West an appropriate traditional civilization."

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Guénon, like Bannon, was drawn to a sweeping, apocalyptic view of history that identified two events as marking the beginning of the spiritual decline of the West: the destruction of the Knights Templar in 1312 and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Also like Bannon, Guénon was fascinated by the Hindu concept of cyclical time and believed that the West was passing through the fourth and final era, known as the Kali Yuga, a 6,000- ­year "dark age" when tradition is wholly forgotten.

Well, all right, then. To the surprise of nobody, Bannon has brought his conservative Catholicism to this bubbling stewpot of ideological poison through a theory that conservative Catholics love to cite in defense of demolishing a social safety net.

Bannon, more synthesist than strict adherent, brought to Guénon's Traditionalism a strong dose of Catholic social thought, in particular the concept of "subsidiarity": the principle expressed in Pope Pius XI's 1931 encyclical, Quadragesimo anno, that political matters should devolve to the lowest, least centralized authority that can responsibly handle them—a concept that, in a U.S. political context, mirrors small- ­government conservatism. Everywhere Bannon looked in the modern world, he saw signs of collapse and an encroaching globalist order stamping out the last vestiges of the traditional.

Oh, Lord, you should pardon the expression. Not this again. Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, loves to cite "subsidiarity" while explaining why knuckling impoverished Americans is a moral act and is to their ultimate benefit. (He's wrong, of course.) More to the point, for all his spiritual tourism, Guenon did more than flirt with European fascism. He took it out to a nice dinner and movie. He raved about Jewish-Masonic plots and claimed that Bolshevism likely was the work of the Jews. He aligned himself with Action francaise, an anti-Semitic nationalist organization in France that traced its history back to the wrong side of the Dreyfus affair.

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Guenon believed that Western civilization first climbed into the hellbound handbasket when the Knights Templar were suppressed in 1314. He was an intellectual who allied himself with historical theories only one small step removed from those regularly expounded by…The Most Awesome Man On Television. Guenon is the classic example of why it is best if some intellectuals are confined to an ivory tower for their entire careers. And now, one of Guenon's devotees has the ear of a president* who doesn't know anything about anything. Deus vult!

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